Tag: Music

Celebrate Billie Eilish’s New Album Launch With Spotify’s First-Ever Artist Hub and Enhanced Experiences

July 30, 2021

Billie Eilish

We have a feeling Billie Eilish fans are about to be very happy. Billie’s highly anticipated—and aptly named—second studio album, Happier Than Ever, debuts today. In honor of the release, Spotify has created our first-ever artist hub and three new enhanced album experiences.

In the last six years, Billie’s listenership has grown exponentially. She rose to become the 12th-most-streamed artist in the world, with fans playing her songs a whopping 15.5 billion+ times. This new hub is the latest milestone in Spotify’s ongoing support of the artist’s meteoric rise. It builds on past memorable moments, including sweeping platform takeovers and our 2019 celebration of the growing artist’s first album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, where we worked with Billie to map out a unique interactive immersive experience. 

Now, we’re upping the ante with Happier Than Ever: The Destination, on-platform releases, a global marketing campaign, and an exclusive Billie Eilish experience in Los Angeles. 

Happier Than Ever: The Destination

Billie’s new hub, Happier Than Ever: The Destination, gives fans a wide range of exclusive content custom-created by the artist herself. It features four shelves chock full of Billie’s catalogue, her personally curated playlist of favorite tracks, surprise Easter eggs, and much more. The custom destination will also be featured on Browse and can only be accessed on Spotify.

The Enhanced Album Experiences

The Destination also contains three new enhanced album experiences: “Fan Mode,” “Billie Mode,” and “Lyric Mode.” Each features new and exclusive custom Billie Eilish content that will bring Billie fans further into her world, including Canvas, Storylines, and Playlist Clips. Here’s what listeners can expect from each album:

  • Fan Mode features exclusive interview content with the star and a soundscape of audio from fans. From pressing questions to Easter eggs, this experience celebrates listeners who know the artist best.
  • Billie Mode is a visual feast. This is an artist who is constantly evolving, and here visitors get to see different versions of Billie in poses that reflect her creative journey and self-discovery. Billie even addresses the camera directly to share her story.
  • Lyric Mode explores the meaning and creation of the star’s favorite lyrics. The words themselves are styled to the album’s Old Hollywood glamour, while exclusive audioliners bring the meaning behind her songs to life.

The IRL Celebration

In addition to the on-platform experiences, fans in LA will be able to attend an in-person event that captures the spirit of Billie’s highly anticipated album. The immersive Happier Than Ever destination brings the bespoke enhanced album experiences to life inside a glamorous 1950s-inspired Los Angeles estate, with Billie herself in attendance.

Spotify’s 2021 Summer Song Predictions Are Here

June 29, 2021

We’ve been counting the days, and summer has finally arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. As parts of the world begin opening up for outdoor concerts and backyard barbecues, this is sure to be a season dominated by feel-good jams and odes to a fresh start. 

Spotify’s global curation team has been hard at work reviewing streaming numbers, analyzing current track trajectory, and peering into crystal balls—all in service of forecasting what songs may feature heavily on your playlists this summer.

Grab your sunscreen and headphones. Here, in no particular order, are Spotify’s official Songs of Summer predictions:

Ready to bask in the sunshine to a new soundtrack? Stream Spotify’s Songs of Summer playlist.

The Power of Streaming Audio for Storytelling: 3 Takeaways From Lydia Polgreen’s Chat With Brandy and Danyel Smith at Cannes Lions

June 21, 2021

Streaming across both music and podcasts has opened up new pathways for creators and listeners to connect. At this year’s virtual Cannes Lions Live, an annual event for the creative communications industry, Spotify hosted “The Sound of Culture: Music and Podcast for the Streaming Generation” to dive deeper into the power of streaming. 

The conversation brought together three women  who have experienced—and influenced—the audio revolution first-hand: Gimlet Managing Director Lydia Polgreen, music industry multihyphenate Brandy, and journalist and host of the Spotify Original Music+Talk show Black Girl Songbook Danyel Smith. Lydia introduced the chat from a studio in New York City while Brandy and Danyel joined in from a set in Los Angeles—but “green screen magic” made them all appear to be together.

 

Despite the women’s varying career paths, all attested to the impact and opportunity streaming has presented to creators of all kinds, giving them the platform to connect with fans and listeners in a new type of two-way conversation.

Read on to hear some of the insights from Lydia, Brandy, and Danyel’s conversation.

The intimacy of podcasting is unmatched

Lydia: “When people put their headphones in, when you’re literally inside their brain, what they’re looking for is that kind of connection. It’s emotional, it’s personal, you’re often talking about things that touch people in very emotional ways, and to me those are the most powerful podcasts.” 

Danyel: “Being a writer for so long … even though you feel like you’re communicating with an audience, it doesn’t sometimes feel intimate. I think there’s something about being inside somebody’s headphones, being in their earbuds, where you’re actually talking to the person.” 

Streaming gives artists greater levels of exposure and listeners more choice

Brandy: “I love being able to connect directly [with my fans]. With Spotify, to be able to go through such an amazing platform to reach millions of people all around the world, you get a chance to have your existing fans introduced to new music, and existing fans introduced to your catalogue that they were probably not privy to.” 

Danyel: “I was one of those [people who] used to look at streaming so cross-eyed like, ‘I have my CDs, I’m good.’ But the thing about streaming to me is, we pick, we decide … and I think that streaming really has this ability to give you such a deeper connection to music. It lets you make your own playlist, it lets you go to your favorites, in the exact moment that you want to hear your favorite.” 

We’re still in the early stages of the audio revolution 

Lydia: “I would like to remind people that we are just at the beginning. People don’t realize this, but 2020 was the year where we went from more than half of the cars on the road having either an auxiliary jack or a Bluetooth connection, meaning that people were no longer using CDs. I think what that tells me is that we are in the early days of the streaming revolution.” 

Ready for more? Badge holders can check out the full conversation on demand on the official Cannes Lions Live hub. 

Introducing New Spotify Mixes: Personalized Playlists Featuring Your Favorite Artists, Genres, and Decades

March 31, 2021

Recently, we’ve been working on a new family of personalized playlists: Spotify Mixes. These mixes, built with you in mind, start with the songs you like and update with songs we think you’ll love. They’ll be rolling out starting today to Spotify users globally.

Sound familiar? It is: Spotify Mixes were inspired by Daily Mix, our most popular personalized playlist among users. And since personalization is our thing, we’re always iterating and improving our products in order to provide the best possible audio experience for our listeners. 

Last month at our virtual event, Stream On, we announced that we would be evolving and expanding our beloved Daily Mix family by adding more playlists that are increasingly personalized to you and evolve over time—so you have more recommendations to choose from based on your moods and interests. 

Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer, said it best: “There isn’t just one Spotify experience. There are actually more like 345 million different Spotify experiences—one for each listener. Every day, half a trillion events—whether they are searches, listens, likes, or countless other actions—take place on Spotify, powering and guiding our machine learning system. This gives us the ability to drive discovery in a way that audio has never seen before.” 

Now, we’re excited to share three new mix categories with clearer names that are easier to understand and remember, that will evolve with you: artist mix, genre mix, and decade mix. Based on the music you already love, while offering a new opportunity for discovery, these new Spotify Mixes represent the next generation of focused, personalized offerings at Spotify—right at your fingertips.

 

Each mix category will have several playlists featuring artists, genres, and decades you listen to often. Here’s how it works: 

  1. Each mix is created with you at the core, based on your listening habits and the artists, genres, and decades you listen to most. They’re rooted in familiarity, meaning that you won’t just hear your favorite artists, but your favorite songs from those artists. 
  2. Then, we supplement by adding in songs we think you’ll love, meaning they’ll be filled with the music you have on repeat alongside some fresh picks. So whether you want to jam out to a specific artist or hear more music from another decade, there’s a mix just for you. 
  3. Finally, each mix updates frequently, so the possibilities are endless and there’s always something new to discover. They’re designed to grow with you over time, so they’ll take your listening into account to help you discover and dive deeper into your new favorite artist, genre, or decade. 

This feature is rolling out to Free and Premium users globally. Find your new artist mix, genre mix, and decade mix within “Search” in the “Made For You” hub, and hear more about machine learning in the latest episode of Spotify: A Product Story. 

Five Things to Know About Spotify HiFi

February 22, 2021

Artists and fans have told us that sound quality is important to them. We agree, and that’s why today at Stream On we announced Spotify HiFi. 

Beginning later this year, Premium subscribers in select markets will be able to upgrade their sound quality to Spotify HiFi and listen to their favorite songs the way artists intended. 

Read on for five things you need to know about our new high-quality music experience:

  1. High-quality music streaming is consistently one of the most requested new features by our users.
  2. Spotify HiFi will deliver music in CD-quality, lossless audio format to your device and Spotify Connect-enabled speakers, which means fans will be able to experience more depth and clarity while enjoying their favorite tracks.
  3. Ubiquity is at the core of everything we do at Spotify, and we’re working with some of the world’s biggest speaker manufacturers to make Spotify HiFi accessible to as many fans as possible through Spotify Connect. 
  4. HiFi will be coupled with Spotify’s seamless user experience, building on our commitment to make sure users can listen to the music they love in the way they want to enjoy it. 
  5. Spotify HiFi will begin rolling out in select markets later this year, and we will have more details to share soon.  

Spotify’s Anchor Innovations Are Bringing the Future of Audio to the Present

February 22, 2021

Over the past few years, our team at Spotify has unveiled several listening experiences that take you beyond the standard formats of playlists and podcasts. Your Daily Drive and The Get Up, for example, incorporate both music and the spoken word in dynamic settings, tailored to your day. But to truly unlock an ecosystem of new ways of listening, we knew we needed to enable the creation of new audio formats. So when we began testing Music+Talk shows last fall, we rolled out the listening experience alongside the ability to create this content—giving everyone the ability to curate music tracks directly into their storytelling. 

Platforms like Anchor and Spotify for Podcasters have enabled access to easier creation of podcasts. (In fact, Anchor accounted for 80% of the new shows on Spotify in 2020—that’s more than 1 million new shows.) And to truly build the future of audio, we want to give everyone the ability to take their creativity further, even beyond the existing concept of a podcast: to make audio experiences that have never before been possible. We think of these possibilities as the “future formats” of audio—and we believe that the best way to build an ecosystem of audio content is to enable its creation, by everyone. 

We began this journey with the rollout of Music+Talk shows and their corresponding creation tools in Anchor. But that was only the beginning. Today at Stream On, we shared several new and upcoming capabilities to enable the creation of future formats of audio. Read on to learn more.

Let your written words travel further with the Anchor + WordPress partnership

Today, we announced a new partnership between Anchor and WordPress to power opportunities for content creators to evolve their work and reach new audiences through the power of audio. With this new tool, available now, bloggers can publish their written content as a podcast with just a few clicks—and podcasters can create a website for their podcast just as easily. This offers a whole new group of creators—those who have historically focused on the written word—to access an entirely new audience via audio and share their voices on Spotify. Check out Anchor’s and WordPress’s blogs to learn more.

Cultivate direct connections with listeners via new interactivity features

Historically, podcasting has been a one-way street—from creator to listeners—with little opportunity for direct feedback. But with Spotify and Anchor, the creation and listening technology is brought together in the same ecosystem, allowing for a back-and-forth. This has enabled us to build interactivity features like Polls and Q&A, which we’ve been testing in partnership with a small beta group of creators. We will be widening that group to more users in the coming months, and creators can sign up here to express interest in participating in future tests of interactivity features.

Combine audio and visual storytelling with video podcasts

In the coming months, we’ll begin testing the ability for creators to add video to their podcasts when they publish via Anchor—meaning these creators will have the power to complement their audio with visual. We first began testing video podcasts on Spotify in July of last year and have since been iterating on the offering. Later this year, more creators can expect to access this feature as we expand the test via tooling that will live in Anchor.

New models for monetizing your work on Spotify

Going forward, we’ll also begin testing a capability for podcasters to explore new revenue streams through paid subscriptions supported by their listeners. Recently, some podcasters have started earning revenue by offering bonus content exclusively for paid subscribers—and soon they’ll be able to do the same on Spotify, where their content can easily be discovered by fans around the world. Creators can sign up here to learn more and express interest in this feature.

We’re excited about what’s to come, and to see creators take advantage of these new tools as they’re released over the coming months. Ready to experiment with your own future format now? Try out Music+Talk, a show format that allows creators to incorporate songs from Spotify’s music catalog directly into their storytelling. Find novel Music+Talk shows—including Maggie Rogers’ Notes from the Archive, Maluma’s Una Semana en Jamaica, and Hulu’s The Ultimate Playlist of Noise—in the Music + Talk hub on Spotify, and make your own show on Anchor.

Creators and Storytellers Shine Bright at Spotify Stream On

February 22, 2021

At Stream On, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek was joined by artists, podcasters, and other notable storytellers. We’d like to thank these guests—from all over the world, both established and emerging—for participating in our virtual event earlier today. 

Visit here for more on our commitment to empowering creators—the new, the rising, and the icons—around the world using our unparalleled data, insights, and powerful platform.

How to Share Your Favorite Songs with Your Child Through Shared Playlists on the Spotify Kids App

January 11, 2021

Since we first unveiled the Spotfy Kids app in October 2019 for Spotify Premium Family subscribers, young listeners have been able to explore a playground of sound and begin a lifelong love of music through a standalone app designed just for them. We’ve also been listening to parents during this time and have been committed to providing increased customization within the app. We started by giving parents the ability to block individual songs or audio stories in the app as well as giving them access to their kids’ “Listening History.” Now, we’re making it possible for parents to share the music they love—from the songs they grew up playing to the family’s dance party playlist—and further curate their child’s audio experience with Shared Playlists on Spotify Kids.

Being able to share your love of music with your children may feel as essential as teaching them to ride a bike. Shared Playlists—a highly-requested and pin-protected parental settings feature—lets parents share music playlists they’ve created in their Spotify account directly with their child in Spotify Kids, allowing them to further curate their child’s listening experience.  

We know that parents often have their own views on which content is and is not appropriate for their kids. The Shared Playlists feature gives parents more control, supplementing the growing library of more than 300,000 kid-friendly tracks and 1,300 playlists on Spotify Kids—all handpicked by our experienced team of editors.

Here’s how to share playlists with your little one using the Spotify Kids app:

  1. Create a playlist of your family’s favorite tunes on the Spotify app (or choose one you made in the past). Make sure to review the lyrics, album cover artwork, and any possible explicit tracks (which will be marked with an ‘E’).
  2. If there are individual songs within the playlist you don’t want to share with your kid, remove them from your playlist in the Spotify app. 
  3. Next, head to the parental settings section of the Spotify Kids app and enter your four-digit pin. 
  4. Tap the “Shared Playlists” section in your kids’ profile. Then, you’ll be able to see your Spotify playlists and select the ones you want to share with each child.
  5. The first time you do this, a pop-up screen will appear to confirm that you want to share the playlist. After, the child can access the playlist on their homepage from a new “Shared with You” section.

Note that if you update the playlist in the Spotify app, the playlist in Spotify Kids will be automatically updated too. Plus, you can revisit the PIN-protected parental settings on Spotify Kids at any time to remove a playlist, access your child’s listening history, and block or unblock tracks.

 

Not sure where to begin? Check out some of the top-shared songs in family playlists on Spotify: 

Ready to jump into Spotify Kids? Sign up for Spotify Premium Family and then download the app here.

Lucy Hale, Jacob Elordi, Mindy Kaling, and Vanessa Hudgens Share Their ‘My Forever Favorites’ Music and Podcasts

September 14, 2020

Is there a song that, the moment you hear it, you’re taken back to a special time in your life? Perhaps it reminds you of your first crush, a bedroom dance party, or that unforgettable beach vacation. It’s possible you might say the same for a podcast—whether it’s one you simply can’t start your day without, or a show that makes you laugh out loud. These are the songs and podcasts you want to share with everyone, and today Spotify is making it easy to do just that with My Forever Favorites.

To celebrate our Music, Meet Podcasts campaign, we’re unveiling My Forever Favorites, a new in-app feature that gives Spotify Free and Premium users around the world the opportunity to share the music and podcasts they love most. Through the app, listeners can create a playlist with their five most meaningful songs and/or podcast episodes and easily post it on their social channels for everyone to see—and bask in the memories. 

Who doesn’t love a bit of nostalgia? We asked actors Lucy Hale, Jacob Elordi, Mindy Kaling, and Vanessa Hudgens to share their My Forever Favorites and tell us a little about the stories behind the songs and podcasts they picked.

NASA Astronaut Christina Koch Shares How Music and Podcasts Made Groundbreaking Trip Extra-Stellar

March 23, 2020

NASA astronaut Christina Koch may have spent 328 consecutive days floating in space (the longest-ever single spaceflight for a woman), but her love for all things audio kept her firmly grounded throughout the journey. 

As part of celebrating Women’s History Month, For the Record recently spoke with Christina to talk about the role of podcasts and music for her and the crew, as well as her friends and family back on Earth. Read on to hear from Christina how Spotify was no “Space Oddity” on board and to check out some amazing photos from outer space. 

 

From BTS to BLACKPINK, the Power of K-Pop Has No Bounds

February 24, 2020

K-Pop is beloved by fans around the world, so we took to the data to see just how popular the music is globally. The genre, which originated in South Korea, has since taken on a life of its own. Thanks to East-meets-West collaborations from BTS and U.S. singer-songwriter Halsey, whose “Boy With Luv” track has over 380 million streams, the reach continues to grow as more and more fans in countries like Egypt and Colombia connect with the music.

Since Spotify released its first K-Pop flagship playlist, K-Pop Daebak, in 2014 (and then a massive hub dedicated to the genre in 2015), there have been more than 41 billion K-Pop streams on Spotify. From rising artists to international collaborations, there’s something for both new and old K-Pop lovers on the platform.

Top-streamed K-Pop artists on Spotify include BTS, BLACKPINK, EXO, TWICE, and Red Velvet. In 2019, BTS was the first group from Asia to surpass 5 billion streams on Spotify. And, as of February 2020, the boy band reached a new milestone: more than 8 billion streams (8 billion streams!) on the platform.

No “FAKE LOVE” here, folks. See how much Spotify listeners love the genre.

Download the infographic here.

Check out the K-Pop Daebak playlist and stream BTS’ MAP OF THE SOUL : 7 The Enhanced Album, which is exclusively available on Spotify.